Or what if two of the purported “unique” factors [of the health-care market] — inevitable participation coupled with cost-shifting — are present? For example, virtually no one can opt out of the housing market (broadly defined) and a majority of people will at some point buy a home. The vast majority of those homes will be financed with a mortgage, a large number of which (particularly in difficult economic times, as we have seen most recently) will go into default, thereby cost-shifting billions of dollars to third parties and the federal government. Should Congress thus have power under the Commerce Clause to preemptively regulate and require individuals above a certain income level to purchase a home financed with a mortgage (and secured with mortgage guaranty insurance) in order to add stability to the housing and financial markets (and to guard against the possibility of future cost-shifting because of a defaulted mortgage), on the theory that most everyone is currently, or inevitably one day will be, active in the housing market?

Further, the government lawyers argued that the Act was not severable; the court acknowledged their premise, declaring the entire monstrosity unconstitutional, with good reason:

In the final analysis, this Act has been analogized to a finely crafted watch, and that seems to fit. It has approximately 450 separate pieces, but one essential piece (the individual mandate) is defective and must be removed. It cannot function as originally designed. There are simply too many moving parts in the Act and too many provisions dependent (directly and indirectly) on the individual mandate and other health insurance provisions — which, as noted, were the chief engines that drove the entire legislative effort — for me to try and dissect out the proper from the improper, and the able-to-stand-alone from the unable-to-stand-alone. Such a quasi-legislative undertaking would be particularly inappropriate in light of the fact that any statute that might conceivably be left over after this analysis is complete would plainly not serve Congress’ main purpose and primary objective in passing the Act. The statute is, after all, called “The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” not “The Abstinence Education and Bone Marrow Density Testing Act.” The Act, like a defectively designed watch, needs to be redesigned and reconstructed by the watchmaker.

If Congress intends to implement health care reform — and there would appear to be widespread agreement across the political spectrum that reform is needed — it should do a comprehensive examination of the Act and make a legislative determination as to which of its hundreds of provisions and sections will work as intended without the individual mandate, and which will not. It is Congress that should consider and decide these quintessentially legislative questions, and not the courts…

Because the individual mandate is unconstitutional and not severable, the entire Act must be declared void. This has been a difficult decision to reach, and I am aware that it will have indeterminable implications. At a time when there is virtually unanimous agreement that health care reform is needed in this country, it is hard to invalidate and strike down a statute titled “The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.”

Big, big victory for the Constitution. It's all still headed for the Supremes but, in the meantime, per Nancy Pelosi, Judge Vinson read the legislation, saw what's in it, and rejected it on Constitutional grounds.

Thursday, January 27, 2011

WTF TIME

Yes, it certainly is WTF TIME when Team Obama's media arm is resorting to Photoshopping the Idiot President into the approving arms of the one and only Ronaldus Magnus.

Ronald Reagan was one of America's greatest Presidents and a champion of individual liberty. And by the way, he didn't pose for bullshit sophomoric leftist unicorn fabrications like this.

Barack Hussein Obama is the very embodiment of everything Ronald Reagan warned us about. He is on record in his own book as despising Reagan, so for Obama to abscond with Reagan's imprimatur is scandalously dishonest and a work of political desperation. This man really is a shameless fraud, and so are the media that carry his water.

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Obama In SOTU: Tax Breaks Are Now Defined As Government Spending

The bipartisan Fiscal Commission I created last year made this crystal clear. I don’t agree with all their proposals, but they made important progress. And their conclusion is that the only way to tackle our deficit is to cut excessive spending wherever we find it – in domestic spending, defense spending, health care spending, and spending through tax breaks and loopholes.

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Tell It Like It Is

A pot-smoking Bush-hater may have shot Democratic Congressman Gabrielle Giffords in the head in a failed assassination attempt, but a neurosurgeon whose parents are Tea Partiers was part of the team that saved her life.

This ad revealed how Obama voted four times against medical care and protection for babies who survive abortions in the Illinois State Senate, while the U.S. Senate was voting 98-0 to pass an identical bill.

Here's a damning clip in which Obama lies about his position on the Illinois BIAPA bill:

In fact, the same day he gave this interview, the Obama campaign admitted he had lied about it for six years until he was forced by his very own record to recant. Thanks to a willing advocacy media, the story was ripped from its womb.

The Real Big Lie

Democrat House Rep. Steve Cohen compared the Republicans to the Nazis yesterday, calling their characterization of Obamacare as a government takeover of medicine a Big Lie of the sort perpetrated by Hitler's propaganda chief Josef Goebbels. Aside from being a despicable charge, it's also demonstrably false - as the Socialist-in-Chief himself confesses in this video:

The Big Lie is that Obamacare is NOT a government takeover of medicine. When the government enacts legislation whose effect is to push private insurers out of the market, as Obamacare was specifically designed to do, it is obviously left to the government to administer health care - the very definition of socialized medicine.

As a sidebar, no-one seriously believed that the president's dishonest call for a "New Civility" was ever going to apply to Democrats and the other hyenas on the left, so the right might as well stop responding to the real propagandists like Cohen and stay focused on the business at hand: repealing Obama lock, stock and two smoking barrels.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Obamacare Back In The Crosshairs UPDATED

Via Free Republic comes news that six more states have joined the lawsuit against Obamacare, bringing the total to 26. The usually reliable Jim Hoft mistakenly claims that's a majority, but obviously his math is off; everyone knows there are thirty-one states still on the sidelines!

UPDATEThe House has voted to repeal Obamacare by a margin of 245 to 189, a larger margin than the vote to pass the mess in the first place. How big is that result? Considering that Obamacare passed by a mere eight votes in the first place, it's huge.

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

J. Eric Fuller's Idiocy Sabotages The Narrative

After the revelation of J. Eric Fuller's textbook left wing moonbattery, one wonders how much more blatant the MSM's Big Lie can get. It certainly reached new heights during an ABC town hall program about "civility" in the so-called political discourse (more accurately known as "Shut up, you teabaggers!") when Fuller's death threat was initially ignored and later swept under the carpet by host Christiane Amanpour.

Fuller's far-left wingnut stylings reveal an extremely violent mindset that finally manifested in the death threat uttered in front of ABC cameras during the live taping. One would think that these revelations would be news to an MSM that has been collectively propagandizing that the exact sort of language and threatening behavior employed by Fuller was to blame for the Tucson murders - an idea that was fine as long as it could be used as a blood libel against Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and conservatives in general, and which they have perpetuated since Oswald pulled the trigger in Dallas. But Fuller has blown their case even further out of the water than Jared Loughner has, and the MSM is going through the Mother Of All Emily Latilla Moments.

James Eric Fuller, 63, who was shot in the knee, had told The Post on Friday, the day before his arrest, that top Republican figures should be tortured -- and their ears severed.

"There would be torture and then an ear necklace, with [Minnesota US Rep.] Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin's ears toward the end, because they're small, female ears, and then Limbaugh, Hannity and the biggest ears of all, Cheney's, in the center," Fuller said.

Also on Friday, Fuller stopped by the home of gunman Jared Lee Loughner and told a neighbor he was going to forgive the shooter, The Associated Press said.

On Saturday, Fuller was carted away for a psychiatric exam after disrupting the town-hall meeting by taking a photo of Tucson Tea Party co-founder Trent Humphries and shouting, "You're dead!"

The MSM's big problem is that events have rapidly converged to expose their "angry right wing extremist" narrative not only as a Big Lie, but the exact opposite of the actual truth - that real threats and violence in the name of a political ideal (as opposed to those manufactured by the leftist media to slander their enemies) are overwhelmingly acted out by the left.

That they are still trying to peddle the same blood libel they've been peddling since the first Kennedy assassination is all you need to know about them.

James Eric Fuller On HypnoThoughts.com Or How I Came To Love The Penalty That Good Men Pay For Not Being Interested In Politics

Areas of Specialty:I use extraordinary persuasive charisma to interest blase, apathetic, oblivious and at times hostile voters to listen to the voice of justice and consanguinity. My experiences encountering public figures and many affluent travelers in person has led me to believe that we all are to blame for George W. Bush.

As Plato stated, "The penalty that good men pay for not being interested in politics is to be governed by men worse than themselves."

The Number One Issue In 2012: Ronald Reagan

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Rethinking Obama's Tucson Performance

I have been surprised by the extent to which conservative commentators like Rich Lowry, Charles Krauthammer and others have lavished praise on Obama for what I thought was a thoroughly cynical and dishonest performance in his Tucson speech, beginning with the fact that he actually changed his hair color for the occasion.

Now Byron York has taken a second look at the speech, which can only be fully evaluated in light of the days leading up to it in which Obama's supporters scandalously tried to pin blame for the shootings on the right, and in the context of what Obama surely wanted it to do for him politically:

Imagine a calculating Democratic political strategist. What would he have wanted Obama to accomplish in the Tucson speech? He would have wanted the president to send the message that the political debate has gotten too rough and should be moderated. Democrats believe that message favors them; they have had much success characterizing, and mis-characterizing, statements by figures like Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, Rush Limbaugh and others as potential incitements to violence. Democrats want a debate about rhetoric because they think they can win it.But since it was impossible to tie the violence in Tucson to Republican rhetoric, the president couldn't very well use the shootings as the premise for a national conversation about the tone of political debate, could he? Yes, he could. It might seem like a stretch -- even to a calculating Democratic strategist -- for Obama to portray Jared Loughner's insanity as the proper starting point for a national debate about civility in politics. Yet that is what he did.

And employing a tactic that in a less sentimental atmosphere would have been seen as breathtakingly cynical, Obama enlisted Christina Taylor Green, the nine year-old girl killed in the shootings, to support his cause. "She saw [politics] through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often take just for granted," Obama said. "I want to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it. All of us -- we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children's expectations."

How can America live up to Christina's expectations? According to Obama, by making sure that her death "helps usher in more civility in our public discourse…because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to the challenges of our nation in a way that would make [the victims] proud." In other words: Christina would have wanted us to tone down the rhetoric. The calculating Democratic strategist would have been very, very happy.

Office Of The Hair Color-Elect

And what’s the first thing you notice — the difference between today and the speech he gave at the memorial? Right. Different color hair. Gray for the memorial, signifying the wise elder, the father figure. Back to dark hair to signify the vigorous young man, ready to forge ahead, solving problems, and restoring his party’s electoral fortunes.

The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council Is A Bunch Of Little Faggots With The Earring And The Makeup

Bloody Nonsense

It never fails.

Whatever Sarah Palin says always gets the idiots' knickers in a twist and exposes their dishonesty and ignorance. The latest example is her use of the term "blood libel" to describe the intelligence-insulting charges leveled by the left wing media complex against the right, especially Palin herself (tellingly, there wasn't a peep from these same idiots earlier in the week when Glenn Reynolds, writing on the same subject, used the term in the WSJ).

The links are out there to the various examples of the resulting faux outrage, chief among them Howard Kurtz, Ruth Marcus and Andrea MitchellMSNBCNEWS, who haughtily declared Palin's use of the term "ignorant." But it is in fact Mitchell and her ilk who are ignorant, as demonstrated by Alan Dershowitz and, more recently, by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who writes in the WSJ:

Despite the strong association of the term with collective Jewish guilt and concomitant slaughter, Sarah Palin has every right to use it. The expression may be used whenever an amorphous mass is collectively accused of being murderers or accessories to murder. The abominable element of the blood libel is not that it was used to accuse Jews, but that it was used to accuse innocent Jews—their innocence, rather than their Jewishness, being the operative point. Had the Jews been guilty of any of these heinous acts, the charge would not have been a libel...

...Murder is humanity's most severe sin, and it is trivialized when an innocent party is accused of the crime—especially when that party is a collective too numerous to be defended individually. If Jews have learned anything in their long history, it is that a false indictment of murder against any group threatens every group. As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Indeed, the belief that the concept of blood libel applies only to Jews is itself a form of reverse discrimination that should be dismissed.

Judaism rejects the idea of collective responsibility for murder, as the Hebrew Bible condemns accusations of collective guilt against Jew and non-Jew alike. "The soul who sins is the one who will die. The son will not share the guilt of the father, nor will the father share the guilt of the son. The righteousness of the righteous man will be credited to him, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against him" (Ezekiel 18).

How unfortunate that some have chosen to compound a national tragedy by politicizing the murder of six innocent lives and the attempted assassination of a congresswoman.

Now: for the honest and sane among us, it doesn't take the authority of a prominent Jewish law professor or a rabbi to prove that Palin's charge is only common sense, but it is always necessary when dealing with a pack of partisan liars, especially ones masquerading as impartial journalists.

Those who slammed Palin for her use of the term "blood libel" are all either ignorant, duplicitous or both, the latter being by far the most likely, as usual, especially given their own generous use of the term and their unquestioning acceptance of its use by everyone but Palin. Hell, they buy into blood libel themselves as they see fit, as in the case of the al Durah lie, the falsified Reuters photos and the Jenin fiasco.

So once again, Palin has suckered the idiots into completely beclowning themselves. Which also never fails. Here's Professor Reynolds:

As I’ve said before, her great gift — or is it a curse? — is her ability to bring out the ignorance, the dishonesty, and the sheer meanness of the credentialed-but-not-educated gentry class in full Technicolor glory.

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Obama's Tucson Speech

No man who lies through his teeth on an almost daily basis, exhorts his followers to punch back twice as hard, attack, get in their faces, kick ass, bring a gun; employs fraud, bribery and intimidation to force his will on the people; consorts with racist preachers, union thugs, criminal shakedown operations disguised as benevolent community organizations, domestic terrorists and self-professed communist revolutionaries for twenty years; who leaks sealed court documents to humiliate and destroy a political opponent; who plays the racism and class-warfare cards at the drop of a hat, who demonizes Americans as bitter clingers, angry rubes, hostage-takers -- the list is almost endless, and that’s just one man, never mind his army of followers -- no such man is in a position to lecture Americans on the virtues of principled political dialogue.

It took less than a day for Barack Hussein Obama to caution Americans against jumping to conclusions about a mass-murdering Islamic jihadist who shot to death thirteen of his U.S.Army comrades and an unborn baby, but he was only too willing to stand back and let his rabid hounds subject his political opposition to their latest wilding for days before using the Tucson campaign rally/memorial to disingenuously suggest it is time to tone things down.

This is Obama’s favorite ruse: let others do the dirty work of smearing his political opposition before swooping in cast as the Messianic Healer, He Who Stands Above It All.

Bullshit. Especially coming from the most petulant punk ever to occupy the White House.

At best his mild chiding was a nebulous mess of moral equivalency, ambiguous enough for his attack dogs to believe he was admonishing their victims on the right; no committed Obama acolyte would feel rebuked in the least by words he demonstrably does not himself believe. It would of course have been inappropriate for Obama to name names on this occasion (a fact that gave further cover to the miscreants, and which also begs the question, why would he bring it up at all?), but by then it was too late for his words to have any real meaning other than as empty platitudes. Conveniently, the damage was already done.

It’s all “do as I say, not as I do” with Obama, who through his proxies has seized on the Tucson murders as the best pretense yet for stifling freedom of expression for conservative voices in America. Obama’s invocation of our better natures is nothing but a hudna, intended to lull those he has already declared “the enemy” into a sense of false security before he lowers the boom with another slew of freedom-killing measures.

Anyone who thinks otherwise has been had by the Charlatan-In-Chief. If you don’t believe me, just wait for the next wave of smears and attacks from the left wing media complex against the American people; it won’t be long, and Obama won’t utter a word in defense of this newly discovered “civility.”

The New Narrative: Defending Oneself Against Leftist Slanders Is "Escalation"

After days of considered silence, Sarah Palin has finally responded to the liars in the MSM and the left who have visciously attempted to blame her (and by extension conservative talk radio, Fox News, TEA Partiers and everyone else they want to shut up) for the Tuscon murders, and we get this breathtakingly hypocritical bullshit from ABC's The Note:

Sarah Palin, once again, has found a way to become part of the story.

This after "Noting" that Palin was drawn into the controversy by those who fabricated it in the first place, precisely for the purpose of attacking her specifically and the right in general. Again, it takes one's breath away to ponder the monumental hypocrisy, but its authors are not alone in their thinking, which is that after all their finger-pointing, blame-laying and groundless accusations, their victims are just supposed to shut up and take being scapegoated for murder - that to do otherwise, to defend themselves and expose their accusers for the shameless liars that they are, is some kind of outrage.

To her slanderers, it's an outrage that Palin won't just take the blows and shut up about it already - no, she has to, in Howard Kurtz' typically leftist reasoning, "escalate her war with the press," implying that she first attacked them, which of course is its own falsehood and slander. There is a war going on between Sarah Palin and the left wing media, but it is in fact a war they declared on her in 2008 and have themselves escalated at every opportunity, with every fabrication and attack on her, her family, her associates, even to those millions of Americans who support her.

And by the way, Howie, isn't the phrase "escalating her war with the press" now considered over-the-top inflammatory rhetoric? The kind that gets people killed?

My Brother's Keepers

As Andrew McCarthy observes, the idiots don't really care about rhetoric; they only care about winning. So it's no surprise that a cursory glance at the twitterscape of the last few days reveals their rank dishonesty and hypocrisy.

Of course, there's always Kos (whom an idiot once recommended to me as a Great Thinker), whose poisonous website had Gabrielle Giffords' name highlighted on his very own "target list" (until, naturally, he dashed it down the memory hole as soon as it was pointed out in the wake of his slur against Palin). The idiots will argue that unlike Palin, Kos didn't *wink-nod* intend to have anyone killed - that was just a metaphor. Which sickening doubletalk is just the beginning of this horrific game they're playing.

But the idiots no longer control the narrative (which is why they spout such heinous lies about us), so I will reiterate what I've said before: this really is war. They just don't like us calling it that because it gets too close to the truth, which is that they will say anything, about anyone, to eventually get their way.

Again, it's not really about the rhetoric - it's really about winning. And they will do anything to win.

Here's a partial list of some of the incidents the left has tried to pin on conservatives. The Columbine shooters. The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing (specifically they tried to blame me for that). The DC sniper. The New York City Times Square car bomb attempt. They tried to blame that on some Tea Partier angry at the health law, then we find out that was radical Islamists. The February 2010 IRS plane attack in San Antonio. Remember that? It had to be an anti-government clown that flew that plane into the IRS office, had to be. The Pentagon subway shooter. The Fort Hood attack. The Discovery Channel hostage taker. And this guy [John Patrick] Bedell who went into the Pentagon and wanted to shoot these people up. This guy, by the way, is a dead ringer for Loughner. Amy Bishop who shot her colleagues at that Alabama college.

The list goes on and on and on. They are countless. The list actually is never ending of incidents like this where the media is damn certain, damn well certain they can give Obama his OKC bombing. They can give a Democrat president some kind of massive murder or disaster caused by conservatives. That remains the number one effort. They sit around and they wait for these events to happen, hoping and praying that what they know are lies -- what they know are false allegations, nonexistent associations -- can somehow be made to be believed by the public at large. How come it took the media so long to discover that there is an altar in the Loughner backyard? This kid was into the occult. Was there God in this guy's life? The kid was evil. He was insane. Was God in his life? You can't ask that, I guess. A media army has been camped out in Arizona for two solid days. They didn't want to report that there is an altar with a skull devoted to all kinds of occult, odd things in this kid's backyard because that would undercut their message that this was a Tea Party-type guy. So they can't report some things here that be absolutely true, so hell-bent are they on perpetuating a fraud. It really is embarrassing. It's even beneath them.

Well, not really. And yet I am still agog at the brazenness of the left's tactics in the aftermath of what should be something - for God's sake - anything else but what they have tried to make of it.

But they want to shut down dissent, and today they see Jared Loughner's insanity, and the tragedy it has wrought, as the means to that end. And that right there is the biggest threat America faces today.

Monday, January 10, 2011

Glenn Reynolds Takes On The Left's Blood Libel

Shortly after November's electoral defeat for the Democrats, pollster Mark Penn appeared on Chris Matthews's TV show and remarked that what President Obama needed to reconnect with the American people was another Oklahoma City bombing.

To judge from the reaction to Saturday's tragic shootings in Arizona, many on the left (and in the press) agree, and for a while hoped that Jared Lee Loughner's killing spree might fill the bill. ...

There's a climate of hate out there, all right, but it doesn't derive from the innocuous use of political clichés. And former Gov. Palin and the tea party movement are more the targets than the source. ...

American journalists know how to be exquisitely sensitive when they want to be. As the Washington Examiner's Byron York pointed out on Sunday, after Major Nidal Hasan shot up Fort Hood while shouting "Allahu Akhbar!" the press was full of cautions about not drawing premature conclusions about a connection to Islamist terrorism. "Where," asked Mr. York, "was that caution after the shootings in Arizona?"

Set aside as inconvenient, apparently. ...

So as the usual talking heads begin their "have you no decency?" routine aimed at talk radio and Republican politicians, perhaps we should turn the question around. Where is the decency in blood libel? ...

To be clear, if you're using this event to criticize the "rhetoric" of Mrs. Palin or others with whom you disagree, then you're either: (a) asserting a connection between the "rhetoric" and the shooting, which based on evidence to date would be what we call a vicious lie; or (b) you're not, in which case you're just seizing on a tragedy to try to score unrelated political points, which is contemptible. Which is it?

I understand the desperation that Democrats must feel after taking a historic beating in the midterm elections and seeing the popularity of ObamaCare plummet while voters flee the party in droves. But those who purport to care about the health of our political community demonstrate precious little actual concern for America's political well-being when they seize on any pretext, however flimsy, to call their political opponents accomplices to murder.

Saturday, January 08, 2011

Krauthammer On Constitutionalism

Some liberals are already disdaining the new constitutionalism, denigrating the document's relevance and sneering at its public recitation. They sneer at their political peril. In choosing to focus on a majestic document that bears both study and recitation, the reformed conservatism of the Obama era has found itself not just a symbol but an anchor.